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Arm your vuvuzelas: WordPress 3.0, the thirteenth major release of WordPress and the culmination of half a year of work by 218 contributors, is now available for download (or upgrade within your dashboard). Major new features in this release include a sexy new default theme called Twenty Ten. Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies. (Twenty Ten theme shows all of that off.) Developers and network admins will appreciate the long-awaited merge of MU and WordPress, creating the new multi-site functionality which makes it possible to run one blog or ten million from the same installation. As a user, you will love the new lighter interface, the contextual help on every screen, the 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements, bulk updates so you can upgrade 15 plugins at once with a single click, and blah blah blah just watch the video. (In HD, if you can, so you can catch the Easter eggs.)

If you’d like to embed the WordPress 3.0 video tour in your blog, copy and paste this code for the high quality version:

<embed src="http://v.wordpress.com/wp-content/plugins/video/flvplayer.swf?ver=1.21" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640" height="360" wmode="transparent" seamlesstabbing="true" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" overstretch="true" flashvars="guid=BQtfIEY1&amp;width=640&amp;height= 360&amp;locksize=no&amp;dynamicseek=false&amp;qc_p ublisherId=p-18-mFEk4J448M" title="Introducing WordPress 3.0 &quot;Thelonious&quot;"></embed>For a more comprehensive look at everything that has improved in 3.0 check out 3.0′s Codex page or the long list of issues in Trac. (We’re trying to keep these announcement posts shorter.) Whew! That’s a lot packed into one release. I can’t think of a better way to kick off the 3.X cycle we’ll be in for the next two and a half years.

The Future

Normally this is where I’d say we’re about to start work on 3.1, but we’re actually not. We’re going to take a release cycle off to focus on all of the things around WordPress. The growth of the community has been breathtaking, including over 10.3 million downloads of version 2.9, but so much of our effort has been focused on the core software it hasn’t left much time for anything else. Over the next three months we’re going to split into ninja/pirate teams focused on different areas of the around-WordPress experience, including the showcase, Codex, forums, profiles, update and compatibility APIs, theme directory, plugin directory, mailing lists, core plugins, wordcamp.org… the possibilities are endless. The goal of the teams isn’t going to be to make things perfect all at once, just better than they are today. We think this investment of time will give us a much stronger infrastructure to grow WordPress.org for the many tens of millions of users that will join us during the 3.X release cycle.

It Takes a Village

I’m proud to acknowledge the contributions of the following 218 people to the 3.0 release cycle. These are the folks that make WordPress what it is, whose collaboration and hard work enable us to build something greater than the sum of our parts. In alphabetical order, of course.

If you’ve made it this far, check out my 2010 State of the Word speech at WordCamp San Francisco, it’s jam-packed with information on the growth of WordPress, 3.0, what we’re planning for the future, and the philosophy of WordPress.